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The strange "vandyked" crozier-like stone objects of schist or shale from Portugal were possibly armes d'apparat, or heads of staves of dignity. There is a sample in the American room at the British Museum, uninscribed.
The forger, however, knew that elsewhere, if not in Scotland, there exist useless armes d'apparat, and he obviously meant to fake a few samples. He was misunderstood. I knew what he was doing, for it seems that "Mr. Apparently I must have "coached" the forger, and told him what kinds of things to fake. But I protest solemnly that I am innocent!
Though as a portrait d'apparat it makes its effect, and reveals the sovereign accomplishment of the master, does it not shrink into the merest insignificance when compared with such renderings from life as the successive portraits of Charles the Fifth, the Ippolito de' Medici, the Francesco Maria della Rovere?
Munro doubtless knows all that is known about armes d'apparat, but he unkindly forgets to credit the forger with the same amount of easily accessible information, when the forger dumps down a decorated slate spear-head, eleven inches long. Believe me, this forger was no fool: he knew what he was about, and he must have laughed when critics said that his slate spear-heads would be useless.
As to the blunt decorated slate weapons, the forger did not mean, I think, to pass off these as practicable arms of the Neolithic period. These he could easily have bought from the dealers. What he intended to dump down were not practical weapons, but, in one case at least, armes d'apparat, as French archaeologists call them, weapons of show or ceremony.
He expected the learned to guess what he was forging; not practicable weapons, but armes d'apparat; survivals of a ceremonial kind, like Mr. Mackenzie's decorated axe-head of soft stone. That, I think, was our forger's little game; for even if he thought no more than Dr. Munro seems to do of the theory of "survivals," he knew that the theory is fashionable.
I submit that the three very curious and artistic stone axe- heads, figured by M. Cartailhac, representing, one an uncouth animal; another, a hooded human head, the third an extremely pretty girl, could never have been used for practical purposes, but were armes d'apparat. Perhaps such stone armes d'apparat, or magical or sacred arms, were not unknown, as survivals, in Scotland in the Iron Age.
Mackenzie, and he makes the same conjecture as to another Scottish stone axe-head. Here, then, if Mr. Mackenzie be right, we have a soft stone axe-head, decorated with "later ornament," the property of a people who knew the metals, and regarded the object as "a sacred or ceremonial one," enfin, as an arme d'apparat. Dr.
In that case, who, in earlier times, made an useless axe-head of soft micaceous stone, and why? It could be of no practical service. On the other hand, people who had the metals might fashion a soft stone into an arme d'apparat. "It cannot have been intended for ordinary use," "the axe may have been a sacred or ceremonial one," says Mr.
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